“Take me to your headman,” Sayre said as they disembarked. She wobbled a bit on land as she got her bearings, but made a better show of it than she had at sea.
“What do you want with a headman?” Kova grumbled. “You brought me here, you got what you wanted.”
“You think I came all the way down here just to bring you home?” Sayre snorted. “You have an exaggerated idea of your own importance, kid.”
Kova flushed. “What do you want, then?”
“That’s between me and your headman.”
“We don’t have a headman. That’s not how we do things in Stormwatch. Everyone’s got equal say and we all pitch in to feed everyone and keep the houses up. Unless we’re on a ship, people don’t take kindly to others telling them what to do,” Kova finished with a pointed edge.
“And some don’t even then.” Sayre hiked her pack higher on her shoulder. Her boar pelt hung from her shoulders. Her two spears—one long and one short—were in her other hand. Both of them had deadly iron heads. The skinning knife and a woodsman’s knife hung from her belt. She was taller now that she wasn’t hunched over the ship’s railing and throwing up everything from biscuit to cane liquor (that had happened only once; after, the mate said he wasn’t wasting anymore on someone who was just going to throw it over-side).
The hunter followed Kova up the beach to the little seaside village where Kova had grown up chasing hounds and catching fish, cracking crabs and picking seaweeds, wriggling her toes over the sharp rocks of the beach. The gulls squawked and swooped and shat and the fishermen hauled in their catch and music tinkled from the high ground where the Stormwatchers lived, up where the rocks turned to grass as shabby as the dwellings.
Up the hill, Kova stopped outside the circle of buildings, watching the people sitting on benches, mending their nets and cleaning fish for the next meals.
Home.
“How’s it feel to be back, Fish?”
Fishbone gamboled into the green, smelling familiarity on the wind. To Kova, though, everything felt different. There were more houses now, sturdier than the shacks and huts sailors threw up in a hurry, too transient to care much. These new houses were made with timber. They would withstand a storm. They were for people who meant to stay.
Kova fingered the rope belt at her hips. All along it were the knots she’d tied into it, telling the story of her journey. Almost a year gone. She swallowed and stepped into the village. A great pole rose from the center, the old mast of a ship. Up and down its height, ropes dangled from nails or were tied about it. Names of the people who’d been lost at sea and a few who’d died happy enough in their beds, some split into ragged edges by years of wind and water. Her grandfather’s name was tied up there, a series of knots and lengths, as was her grandmother’s.
But the living interested Kova more than the dead. She scanned the circle of houses, looking for Ta’aliya, uncertain whether she was ready to see her or not.
“Kova?” an incredulous voice called from one of the benches in the circle. Pona, a friend of Kova’s mother, grinned over the fishing net she was mending. Her black hair was tied up in the back, showing the shaved undersides, like Kova’s. Unlike Kova, black tattoos curled up Pona’s neck and into the short hairs. As she straightened to squint at Kova, she grabbed some dried seaweed from the bowl at her side and crunched it in her mouth. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. And taller? Bloodless earth, I’m getting old.”
“Pona!” Kova ran over and hugged the older woman. She smelled of brine and smoke and rope wax. Pona didn’t stand or release the net in her hands, but she pressed her tattooed cheek close to Kova’s.
“It’s good to see you back home, little shark.” Then Pona caught sight of Sayre, who was scanning the area with a sea hawk’s keen interest. “Who’s your handsome friend?”
“No.” Kova held an admonishing finger in Pona’s face. “Where’s Ta’aliya?”
“I don’t know.” Pona trailed off like she knew something but it wasn’t the answer to the question Kova asked, so she wasn’t going to say it.
Kova frowned, ready to pry, but Sayre interrupted.
“The kid says you don’t have a headman. Who do I speak to if I have business?”
“Business?” Pona scoffed, then quirked a smile. “What sort of business? I could be your business.”
Sayre twisted her wrist and the iron tips of her spears emerged from the shadow of her body. “This kind of business.”
Pona regarded Sayre anew, this time snagging on the details: the spears, the thin, silvery scar along her cheek splitting her lip, the boarskin over her shoulder. She let out a low whistle.
“You’re not Boarbane.”
“I’m not?” Sayre’s voice deepened, with an amused lilt.
Kova rolled her eyes and left them to their flirting. Instead, she checked the green for the next most useful person and found Ta’aliya’s sister, Willa, arguing with Young Hoot outside of the closest thing Stormwatch had to an inn like in the bigger towns up north. Really, it was just a communal house, big enough to shelter a few who were passing through but didn’t want to sleep on their boats or under the stars. In a good storm or a cold night, they’d all gather inside, bring their drinks and their food and share them round with music and dancing and fish tales. Other times, it was like this—disputes and discussions, boasting and brawling.
Willa and old Artiga faced down the young fisherman whose voice grew louder every moment.
“We have to send a party to get them back!” Hoot shouted.
As his voice broke through other conversations and tasks, Kova noticed something odd in the way people glanced from their work to the sea. Not the way everyone always watched the sea, waiting for someone to come home, or scanning the horizon for a storm. Not even that awe of the ocean’s impossible grandeur that takes everyone from time to time. No.
They were looking at it with fear.
Willa shook her head and folded one arm across her chest. The other cupped the back of a toddler’s head where it clung to her leg, sucking his thumb.
“Better to spend our resources on our defenses. We’ll set new watches at night.” Though she spoke to Hoot, she surveyed the green. Her gaze alighted on another toddler, twin to one at her hip, and the tension in her shoulders eased. “We’ll keep everyone safe.”
Like most of the Stormwatchers, Willa and Ta’aliya came from fisherfolk, but their parents had made some good choices and some bad gambles, so the two sisters were the last of their family. Willa’s mourning was written on her neck. Though she barely took to sea anymore, she kept her finger in their parents’ smuggling and had a respected reputation on the Bent Coast.
“You’re young, Hoot.” Artiga was only a fisherman, as old as Hoot’s grandfather, but he was well liked. “Listen to an old salt-beard when I say, better to wait and see what the horizon brings before you rush out to meet it.”
“We’ll keep everyone safe,” Hoot mimicked Willa. “Easy for you to say. Your family’s here, they are safe. And you—” he jutted his bony chin at Artiga “—you don’t even have a family.”
Willa scowled, but she did clutch the toddler at her hip closer, glancing away once more to make sure the other was near.
Artiga’s lined face sagged. Dark streaks in his gray hair, tattoos stretching from his neck to his fingertips, the black deep and fresh on his neck but faded near the fingertips. As thin and tough as his trade tools. He reached out a hand to cup Hoot’s cheek but the young man tilted his jaw out of reach.
“All of Stormwatch is my family, boy. I pulled you from your own mother and handed you to Old Hoot myself. He may as well have been my brother. Iron of my own blood. But the risk is too high to do it ourselves. We’re not fighters, we’re fishermen.”
“Some of us want answers. Some of us want justice. I’ll go to the Tidings if I have to—”
“Kova?” Willa caught sight of Kova, lip curling, eyes narrowing.
“Willa. Where’s—”
“Who are you?” Willa glared at Sayre who had come up behind Kova. Unsubtly, Willa pushed the child behind her. The kid—Tomel or Nuka, Kova never could guess right—peeked up at Kova and Sayre with wide blue eyes and sandy hair. The twins looked nothing like their mother.
“I’m Sayre Boarbane. Slayer. I saw your call. You wanted help.”
“We didn’t send for a monster hunter,” Willa started, but Artiga stepped forward.
“I did.” The old fisherman held out his arm.
Sayre didn’t take his arm. “I deal with monsters, not squabbling headmen. Do you need my help or not?”
“No,” Willa said at the same time as Artiga and Hoot said, “Yes.”
Artiga dropped his arm and lowered his voice. “Our people have been disappearing in the night. We don’t know how, but it’s no raiding party.”
Kova’s stomach turned, her throat tightening. “Willa, where’s Tal?”
“You’ve some nerve, Kovani. Is this where you went?” Willa sneered. “Skulking off for Artiga and breaking Tal’s heart in the process?”
“Where is she?”
“She’s none of your concern anymore. And Stormwatch is none of yours, slayer.”
“You’re right. It’s not. But for the right payment, I’ll make it my concern.”
“We didn’t agree to this,” Willa said. “The town won’t pay without a vote.”
“I’ll pay,” said Artiga. “I’ve treasures of my own that should be enough, Boarbane. No vote needed.”
“The price depends on the problem.” Sayre dug the butt of her long spear into the ground and leaned against it casually.
Willa’s attitude was enough to tell Kova that Ta’aliya was safe, but it didn’t reassure her. She left Sayre to talk to Willa and Artiga. That wasn’t going anywhere fast. Hoot stalked away alongside her, glaring over his shoulder.
“They’re wasting time,” he muttered.
“Sayre will fix it.” Kova was confident in the hunter’s talents, even if Sayre was a bloodless dick. “You seen Tal anywhere?”
“If she goes, I’m going with her.” Then he turned his stormy expression on Kova, finally seeing her. “Ta’aliya? Probably out fishing with the new girl, isn’t she?” He shrugged Kova off and quickened his step, leaving her behind, unaware of the hole he’d put in her belly, sure as he’d stuck her with a fishing spear.
Kova stood in the middle of the rocky grass path, stunned. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. Beneath the shock, anger. A familiar thing, anger. Usually its target was her mother, with her swinging moods, pulling and pushing Kova away. Sometimes, it was those who spoke ill of her mother, as if they were so much better. Mostly, she stuffed it down. Otherwise, she tried to row away from it—literally, if she could.
She had thought Sayre would be the answer to all that.
Kova inhaled slowly, then exhaled. If Tal wasn’t here yet, she’d go home. Speak to her ma.
That prospect filled her with just as much dread. She marched through the village to the only place on land she’d ever called home, where she spent her childhood whenever she wasn’t scooting around on her grandfather’s small fishing boat or learning to sail on her mother’s hunting ship.
It was a solid thing, made of logs from the forest to the east. Before Kova left, most of the houses in Stormwatch were made of cast-off deck planking too warped to use in another craft. Homes no one intended to become permanent. Not her grandfather’s, though. He’d staked his claim when he was young, was one of the original men of Stormwatch, he always said. And the town had loved and respected him enough to keep their grievances about his daughter quiet.
Then Kova’s grandmother had died and her ma got worse and her ma and her grandfather spent as much time shouting at each other as they did sailing their separate boats. They’d always been like two tomcats. He didn’t have the heart to keep fighting it.
He died of grief, people whispered when they thought Kova couldn’t hear.
Greif for his wife, said some.
Grief for his troublemaker daughter, said more.
And if Kova wanted to get away from that, too? Away from the choice between two legacies, away from the fact that she knew which path everybody expected her to follow?
Kova expected the house to be quiet. Empty. Expected her mother to be at sea. But voices came from inside. The outer door was open. A woman’s voice. A man’s. The shrill of children playing. None of them familiar. She stood there with her hand half raised, ready to push aside the beads hanging over the door, her door, something in her chest wrenching though she couldn’t name it.
“Hello?” The beads clacked open, revealing a pale-skinned woman Kova had never seen, her cheeks red-patched by the sun. “Do you need something?”
The words were friendly, her head tilted in curiosity, though she kept a mother’s stance between Kova and the children inside.
“This is—my house—my grandfather—” Kova stammered.
The woman’s friendly face shuttered. “This is our home. It was empty when we arrived.”
“Empty.”
Kova had been gone. Her mother’d been gone, too, apparently. For too long.
She backed away, tripped and barely caught herself from falling on her arse.
The man appeared beside the woman in the doorway, peering out at Kova, a protective arm around the woman’s shoulders.
Kova fled to the beach.
